In Doom Patrol you can save the world no matter how broken you are

Most television shows are not strange enough. Strange things happen on it – everyone saw Twin summit and loves a tribute – but really weird TV shows are rare. Shows like are rarer Doom Patrol, a series that is really strange and unexpected at every turn, but is just as interested in empathy as it spoils you or makes you laugh. Calling it a "superhero show" feels like bad service. It is more of a therapy with superheroes and talking cockroaches and paintings that people eat.

Doom Patrol is back for a second season this week after jumping over to HBO max from his previous home on the DC Universe app (where it can still be streamed), and it features one of the most unusual casts of protagonists you'll see on every show, let alone a comic cast.

In the eponymous Doom Patrol there is Cliff Steele, a former racing driver whose brain is now in a robot body (the racing driver is played by Brendan Fraser, the robot body by Riley Shanahan); Jane, a system of 64 different personalities, each with their own superpower (most played by Diane Guerrero); Rita Farr, an actress from the Golden Age whose body can goose bumps (played by April Bowlby); Larry Trainor, a terribly scarred pilot who shares his body with a "negative energy spirit" (played by Matt Bomer in voice and flashback and Matthew Zuk in his fully connected costume); and Vic "Cyborg" Stone, an aspiring superhero who became a part machine after an accident (played by Joivan Wade).

This gang of outsiders was gathered by Niles Caulder (Timothy Dalton), who was immediately kidnapped by the mysterious, apparently all-powerful Mr. Nobody. Despite the clear lack of chemistry and the few noble intentions, the ad hoc team is looking for the man who brought them together and comes across all kinds of bizarre threats.

The elevator parking space for the Doom Patrol Comic book is that they are the "strangest superheroes in the world" and as created by Bob Haney, Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani in the 1960s, this mainly meant that a team of outcasts from the outside world was seen as "freaks" who face the strangest villains His creators could imagine how the animal-vegetable-mineral-man, a guy who was partly plant, partly stone and partly dinosaur. The Doom Patrol The TV show has many of these classic comics in its DNA, but it's mainly based on the comic reinvention in the late 1980s by writer Grant Morrison and artist Richard Case, a celebrated series of stories that took the team in a surreal direction led. with Dadaist villains who wanted to plunge the world into absurdity and characters like Danny The Street, a sentient non-binary city block that travels from city to city.

The result is a show that is perhaps the nicest mess on TV. Broken people who hardly understand themselves are faced with incomprehensibly strange threats. They then have to overcome these threats by understanding each other better, even if they don't necessarily get along or when the limits of good taste are left far behind. (To avert a certain apocalypse, you have to let a giant talking cockroach eat you and convince yourself that it is really cool for a similarly giant rat. Another involves a pocket size in the ass of a donkey.)

Much Doom Patrol, especially in the first few episodes, is deceptive of how it goes Dead Pool-style confident antics. His main opponent, Mr. Nobody (Alan Tudyk), is a disgusting being who exists beyond time and space and is aware that he is on a streaming TV show and will not hesitate to tell you if he is sees that a trope is used or avoided. But like most of his characters, who are aggressive and annoying so as not to be vulnerable, the show finally opens to reveal heartache and pain and show what it's like to do the difficult job of getting past it move.

It's a story about outsiders that is actually interested in what causes people to be marginalized, and not just as an excuse for aggressive characters and sharp jokes. Every character on the show is on the fringes of society and could not be accepted if he wanted to, not with the world as it is. They're not optimists – a better world is unlikely to come – but they can do their part to keep it from deteriorating and look for others like them that society thinks too broken to be worth.

Sure, there are fights in Doom Patrol – Big, ridiculous fights with letters from assassins that people never send, or tooth-filled asses or strange cultists from a snow globe world – but fighting is never the answer. Talk is. To love yourself is. Acceptance is the line that every member of Doom Patrol tries to clarify, but can never fully achieve. But that's okay. Every time they come a little closer.

Another simple reason to enjoy Doom Patrol is that it plunges completely into the absurdity that comics have at their best. Comics form the material of the show – characters travel in a pocket size, which is hidden in the white space between the panels of a comic, another character emerges directly from one and past, present and future all exist side by side.

Season 1 overcame a mediocre premiere and became a show where anything can happen. She slowly built the team up before pulling out the carpet from under them in a finale that drove a wedge between the crew. The second season continues with a premiere that begins immediately afterwards and shows the team in one Honey, I shrunk the kidsStyle adventure, trying to help a girl whose imaginary friends can come to a scary life.

Superhero fiction is obsessed with the idea of ​​"saving the world", and this salvation usually boils down to beating the right people. Doom Patrol believes it is more difficult. Someone is always hurt, is always overlooked and lacks the support they need. The people who help the broken are broken too. These are heroes who don't know what a better world looks like. Not sure what a better version of is themselves look like. But you know what an honest is. They can work towards that. So they can help everyone.